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For many concert-goers, the opening act is an afterthought at best. It's what the rest of the crowd is doing while you're across the street getting a pre-concert buzz at the nearest bar, or who is finishing up as you're showing up at the last minute to find your seat.
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On the other side of the coin, I've also witnessed more than my fair share of shows where the opening band was heckled — or far worse. Some of these instances were simply cases of really ill conceived booking on the part of the concert promoters. I can recall, for example, a J. Geils Band concert which was opened by a guy named Rick Roberts (who would later go on to a brief, but decent career with the band Firefall). Roberts had the unenviable task of serenading the boogie hungry J. Geils crowd with nothing else but his voice and an acoustic guitar. The crowd was merciless. I actually bumped into Roberts in the men's room during the intermission and found myself doing my best to console the poor guy, who was in tears.
The same thing happened a few years later when Graham Parker opened for Thin Lizzy. Parker was greeted by shouts of "punk-rock fag" from the crowd. You have to understand that this was at a time when rock music had become very polarized along genre lines. I ended up buying Parker a drink later that night at the hotel bar, and telling him I thought he sounded great.
Every once in a while, though, the openers will fight back. Around the same time as the Parker/Lizzy incident, I saw a band called Rubicon open for who I want to say was either Elvis Costello or Patti Smith, and get mercilessly booed by the crowd. Rather than give up, however, the Rubicon boys rose to the challenge and threw it right back at them. The lead singer hurled obscenities into the microphone, before being eventually unplugged and escorted off the stage by security.
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